Wednesday, September 18, 2013

A Tale of Two Coups

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I
keep a black and white photograph on the wall.It’s a grainy old black and white photo, poorly mounted and
inexpertly framed.Very few people
who mount the stairs from the door to my living room recognize the faces in the
picture.Usually they ignore it
completely but sometimes their attention is drawn by the large hammer and
sickle in the center foreground.It has been years since any visitors recognized that the unsmiling,
somber figure just above and behind the Communist emblem is the former
President of Chile, Salvador Allende. He is, appropriately perhaps, surrounded by
members of the Popular Unity government and yet appears to be abstracted and
isolated.Only the Minister of
Labor, Luis Figueroa, is looking directly at Allende who lay dead in Chile’s
presidential palace, La Moneda, a week after the photograph was taken. General Augusto Pinochet had seized power in a military coup and the Chilean Air Force had bombed Chile's own government center.

For
obvious reasons the coup against President Mohammad Morsi has been compared to the
coup against Allende.Emotionally
the picture is compelling:democratically elected presidents forced out of office by generals who
profoundly hated their politics and who then pursued increasingly violent campaigns
against the remaining civilian opposition.In the world of American academic politics the comparison is
especially powerful because it suggests that the anti-communism that drove
policies a generation ago and now seems shameful and regrettable is surfacing
again as “Islamophobia” or an irrational hatred of Islam.Saving democracy, a lost cause in 1973, is now possible and a
moral imperative as the events of the past are replayed in a different part of
the world with a different cast of characters.

It
would be useless to enter an academic hissing match about whether the
characters really are playing the appropriate roles:Egyptian General Abdelfattah Sisi as Pinochet and Morsi as
Allende.The argument as it
stands is rooted in the moral sentiments of observers, but a closer look
at the comparison can be useful.It
reveals the substantial differences between the use of the electoral process
for economic change and political democratization.It also reveals how military interventions may have very
different ways of deploying violence, even overwhelmingly high levels of
violence.And it reveals the degree to which,
regardless of the extent or experience of constitutional rule, armies are
likely intervene when levels of political polarization reach the point at which
civil conflict threatens.

At
the most superficial level the comparison obviously succeeds and equally obviously
fails.Two presidents,
democratically elected, were both ousted by a military establishment.One, Allende, was engaged within a
political system that had been a functioning constitutional democracy for at
least 40 years.He sought to fashion
a transition to socialism and more particularly to enhance the role of the
state in the economy and to make the distribution of goods and services more
equitable.Morsi’s election in an
open contest occurred a year after the collapse of a 60-year old authoritarian
regime under the influence of an immense revolutionary upheaval.He appears to have been laying the foundation
for an Islamic state the contours and content of which remain somewhat vague.Allende was secular, socialist and
considered himself a democrat; Morsi was an Islamist, committed to private
property, and also considered himself a democrat.

From
the viewpoint of American social scientists and policy makers the differences may
not matter.Both men were engaged
in “transformative politics” against entrenched interests.Both had been chosen by the appropriate
mechanisms to hold the country’s highest executive office.Both were overthrown by the military
bureaucracies acting on their own and in their own interest.Neither army had fought a foreign enemy
in decades and neither general had any experience in combat.Calling Al-Sisi Pinochet, like calling
Pinochet Hitler, is sufficiently satisfying not to require further
reflection.

What happens though if we look at
the comparison as something less like a slogan and more like an analysis?We can begin to see more clearly the
outlines of Morsi’s catastrophic political failure and we may begin to
understand some of its roots.We
may also begin to see, unpleasant as it may be, more clearly into the ways in
which the Egyptian military intends to use force.

Like Mohammad Morsi, Salvador
Allende running as the candidate of the Popoular Unity Coalition won the
presidency with a slender lead. Although Morsi received just under 25 % of the
vote in the first round, he was elected by about 52 % in a run-off. Unlike Morsi, however, Allende only won
a plurality, 36.2 % of the 3 million votes cast; conservative Jorge Alessandri
won 34.9 % of the votes and Christian Democrat Radomiro Tomic has 27.8 %.Unlike Egypt, Chile then had no
run-off.With no majority
candidate, the names of the top two candidates went to the legislature which
itself was dominated by Allende’s opponents.The legislature
had historically chosen the candidate with the most votes, and to placate his
opposition Allende signed a formal “Statute of Constitutional Guarantees.”

In the end, Christian Democratic
congressmen voted for Allende rather than abstain or return Alessandri who had
been president from 1958-1964 to the office.Allende obtained the presidency with a considerably weaker
electoral mandate than Mohammad Morsi.He knew it, his opponents knew it, and the Chilean population knew it.Allende’s Socialist party did gain the
Interior (as in Egypt the ministry that controls the police unlike the US where the Interior Department controls the national parks) and Defense
ministries but despite nominal civilian control over the Armed Forces it proved
impossible to prevent a coup.Jose
Toha, Allende’s first Minister of the Interior, was suspended by Congress for tolerating
the emergence of left-wing militias He was then named Minister of Defense by
Allende but was ultimately forced from that portfolio as well. Clodomiro Almeyda, a left-wing
Socialist, replaced him until he was himself succeeded by General Carlos
Prats.

Unlike Egypt in 2012, Chile had a well-established
constitution.It had been written
in 1925 and the timing of elections made it almost impossible for a single
party to control the executive and legislative branches.No exception occurred in 1970 for the UP
coalition had 20 senators (of 50) in the upper house and 60 (out of 150) in the
lower house. Unlike Morsi whose own coalition had 235 of 508 seats in the lower
house and 105 of 180 elected seats in the upper house, Allende never had a
friendly legislature.Before the
Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court dissolved the lower house, Morsi had a
working plurality in the Egyptian parliament.After the dissolution of the lower house and the passage of
the new constitution in December 2012 Morsi was a president with a majority in
the rump upper house that constituted the legislature (and to which he had, by
right, appointed 90 of the total of 270 members).

The hostility of the courts and the
legislature was directly rooted in Allende’s socialist agenda challenging the
inviolability of private property.His insistence on completing the nationalization of the large mining
properties (already begun as “Chileanization” under Eduardo Frei, his Christian
Democratic predecessor) as well as other sectors of the economy brought him
into conflict with the judiciary and the legislature.His equally great insistence on distributing many of the
fruits of the nationalization through programs such as provision of milk to all
children was seen by many as a threat: whether by degrading the efficiency of
the economy or deploying the strategy of the “rentier state” (a phrase that had
barely been invented at the time) to enhance his party’s control over the
powers of government.

The relationship of the Armed
Forces to the executive and more generally to the constitutional order is less
easily comparable than other aspects of the two presidents’ tenure.Allende’s civilian ministers of defense
and the interior never really controlled the armed forces or the police
respectively.Nevertheless, when
Allende was elected the Chilean Armed Forces had not intervened against a
civilian government in more than 40 years and it was common to argue that Chile
had an unbroken chain of constitutional governments going back to the late
nineteenth century.No coup was possible
in Chile until violence within the military itself had brought new leadership
to the Army. This process began
when a group of dissident officers and former officers, with the aid of the US
Central Intelligence Agency, murdered Army Chief of Staff General René
Schneider in October 1970 shortly before Allende’s inauguration.

Until 1973, the Army had been guided by the so-called
“Schneider doctrine” expressing the general’s belief in the need for a complete
separation of political and military power.Schneider’s successor, General Carlos Prats, accepted the
doctrine and even put down an attempted coup on June 29, 1973, the so-called
Tanquetazo. Prats was forced out
of the Army weeks before the coup and in 1974 was murdered in exile by the
Chilean secret services.In his
place, Allende appointed the little known and colorless Augusto Pinochet as
chief of staff.It is not
surprising that before 1970 scholars ranked the Chilean Armed forces as one of
the least likely to make a coup and that until the very end few Chileans or
foreigners had reason to believe that any move by the army would result in a
dictatorship that would last nearly two decades.

The Egyptian Armed Forces have a
very different relationship to the government and since 1952 have been
intimately connected to the sinews of the state if they did not in fact
constitute them.Until the election
of Mohammad Morsi all Egyptian presidents had come from one or another branch
of the Armed Forces; generals and former generals served as provincial
governors, government ministers, and at the head of state-owned economic
enterprises.The armed forces have
been an autonomous administration within the larger state and the 2012
constitution formalized that relationship by requiring that the Minister of
Defense be a general rather than a civilian and by removing the Army’s budget
from significant legislative oversight.For the first time in Egyptian history the army hierarchy itself came to
power in a coup against former President Hosny Mubarak in February 2011 and
assumed the country’s executive and legislative authority until at least
mid-2012 when it relinquished both authorities to elected civilians.In August 2012 Morsi retired the two key military leaders who
had ousted Mubarak, Mohammad Tantawi and Sami Anan, and chose Abdelfattah
Al-Sisi as the new Chief of Staff and Minister of Defense.

It is no secret that since 1954 Egyptian
governments and the Armed Forces have tried many times to destroy the Muslim
Brothers.Morsi thus faced an
officers’ corps with no particular commitment to constitutional government and
with a deep distaste for his politics.Despite much wishful thinking by observers outside the army, it has also
shown no inclination to split in the face of popular unrest.It is difficult to know whether Morsi
truly thought he had neutralized the Armed Forces but if he did it was, given
their previous 60 years, a colossal mis-reading of the situation.

What of the political context of
the periods during which Allende and Morsi held office?This is where the similarities may be
greatest but where crucial differences also become most apparent.Lacking control of the legislature and
attempting to change the structure of property rights in favor of tenants,
workers, and the impoverished, Allende and the UP resorted to rule by decree
and refused to implement countervailing court orders based on the existing
laws.Allende thus found himself
increasingly in conflict with the judiciary and the Supreme Court.Although the Chilean Supreme Court is
far less powerful than its Egyptian counterpart, the justices engaged in a public
dispute with Allende including an exchange of letters accusing him of
undermining the rule of law. Congress had been in the hands of his opposition since 1970
and the 1973 elections did not materially change the political balance of
forces.Mass demonstrations against
Allende to influence a legislature already hostile to him were unnecessary. On
August 22, 1973 a majority of the lower house voted to ask the military to
intervene and overthrow the Allende government.

The UP’s attempt to re-shape the
Chilean economy had important repercussions especially in a country that had
long suffered from high levels of inflation and rigidly separate labor markets
and whose balance of payments depended on the export of a single
commodity.The decline of copper
prices diminished the government’s income during Allende’s presidency and the
ensuing lack of foreign currency made imports, including food, scarce and
expensive.Workers in the formal
sector, especially mining and processing, had won some significant wage
increases.Price-fixing and
rationing, especially the role of the Price and Supply Boards, worsened the
situation rather than ameliorating it.This in turn helped to re-create
inflationary pressure that reached at least 140% a year in 1972 whereas
measured Egyptian inflation appears to be on the order of 12 %. Much is made of
the depreciation of the Egyptian (from about 5 to the US dollar in 2010 to
somewhat over 7 today,), a drop of about 30%.In the equivalent period of Allende’s presidency the escudo
dropped from 20 to the dollar to 3000.Unhappy as Egyptians have been with the worsening economic situation
over the past year it is hard to imagine how the country would have reacted to
the vaporization of the currency that Chile experienced which would have
rendered the central bank’s foreign reserves worthless long before they were
spent.

Nationalizations included firms
driven out of business by worsening economic problems and this made investors
increasingly skittish. Consequently the population suffered from increasing
shortages of consumer goods and rising prices that affected the poor as well as
the wealthy.Strikes and lock-outs
also affected production and a strike by truck-owners, many of whom were
impoverished, with both political and economic goals dislocated commerce.Allende’s opponents viewed the
repression of the truckers’ strike (deemed economic sabotage by the UP government)
as a violation of his pledge to respect the constitution.One crucial difference between the
strikes during the Allende period and widespread strikes in Egypt over the last
two and a half years is that neither the Army nor the Muslim Brotherhood used
its regulatory authority to win the support of striking workers against owners
or to extend the role of state ownership or control.The strikes by
associations known as gremios were
for economic ends but they also had an anti-trade union edge.Unsurprisingly the Chilean trade union
movement (CUT) strongly supported Allende, opposed the gremios, and in turn received significant support from the UP
government.

In Egypt the nature of the
revolutionary upsurge itself affected several key industries, notably tourism
an important employment sector and a source of foreign currency.Egypt is often called a rentier state
but unlike Chile in the 1970s it has several streams of foreign income.Remittances and Suez Canal receipts are
other important sources of foreign currency although Canal passages declined
somewhat in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008.Egypt ceased being an oil exporter in
2007.Foreign exchange is crucial
for a country that imports about half the wheat it consumes. There were longstanding shortages
of butane gas (crucial for cooking and heating among lower income groups),
gasoline (crucial for transport), diesel and electricity.From late 2011 on there were frequently
long lines at gas stations, rolling blackouts, and insufficient diesel for a
variety of urban and agricultural production.The Egyptian trade union movement has long been under the
control of the state but has been challenged by wildcat strikes and independent
union movements.Its independent
leadership resisted any alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood and its formal
organization is in disarray.To
the degree that voting in the industrial cities of the Delta over the past
three years is any indication it would be difficult to say that there is any
coherent majority organizationally or politically with the industrial
workforce.

Allende, certainly a secular
politician if not necessarily a liberal, faced significant opposition from devout
Catholics and the church hierarchy.In March 1973, the UP government announced plans to reform the
educational system (K-12), the so-called National Unified School curriculum
(ENU). Perhaps the biggest problem for Allende was that the ENU called for
educating students in the values of “socialist humanism” which the Church found
offensive and which provoked sufficiently significant opposition to force
Allende to temporize (but not withdraw) the proposal.Morsi was obviously not committed to a secular program
in education or anywhere else nor was he committed to overhauling the Egyptian
educational system.He and the
Muslim Brotherhood evoked opposition from the mainstream religious
establishment represented by the Mufti of the Republic or the Shaykh of
Al-Azhar.

Internationally, however, the two
leaders faced different situations with the United States.US policy makers increasingly wanted to
see Allende ousted both because they feared the emergence of a socialist
government on the Latin American continent and because the Hickenlooper
Amendment formally committed the US to oppose governments that nationalized
foreign property with insufficient compensation.It would be wrong to say that the US supported Morsi as such
but the US appears to have been committed to Morsi’s presidency as a step
toward democratization and initially sought, albeit halfheartedly, for his
return as the legitimate holder of the office.

To sum up, by the weeks before the
respective coups Morsi and Allende faced widespread public opposition that may
have accounted for a majority of the population. This opposition had also taken the form of street fighting
and the increasing possibility of violent confrontations. They also both faced
significant opposition from significant state institutions, notably the
judiciary and the military.They
both faced a rapidly deteriorating economic situation.

Allende’s
opposition had two primary roots.One lay in opposition to his project for socialist transformation.The US, Chilean private enterprise,
landowners, the Catholic Church, sections of the Armed Forces, and
multinational firms all opposed the policies that aimed at a Chilean transition
to socialism for reasons of material interest, ideology, or principle.In addition there was significant
opposition to the Allende government because of the economic and social
disruption the projected socialist transformation caused.Allende and the UP may have expected to
win over Chile’s working class and the poor as the socialist transformation
went forward, but the real process of implementing the outlines of socialism
alienated many Chileans.

Before
addressing the nature of the opposition to Morsi it is worth noticing that his
project, unlike Allende’s, was vague at best and contradictory at worst.The US government and many specialists
have analyzed the events of the last two years as a process of
democratization.Was this,
however, the way that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Freedom and
Justice Party looked at events?Morsi
and MB/FJP appear to have been of two minds about the process in which they
were engaged.It has never been clear if they saw
themselves as a party committed to democratic transition or to the
revolutionary re-structuring of the state and politics.The clearest way to understand the
difference is to look at how the Morsi government sought to deal with the
so-called feloul or remnants of the
old regime.Morsi tried by decree
to deny political rights to members, especially from the leadership, of the
dissolved National Democratic party. When this failed by order of the Supreme Court it was
written into the new constitution.It is easy enough to understand why a revolutionary party wants to proscribe
leaders of the old order, but it is less easy to see why a democratizing party
wishes to do so especially when the existing law limits the political rights of
anyone convicted of criminal acts.Acute as the political polarization in Chile was it never occurred to
the UP, despite its formal commitment to revolutionary social and economic
change, to strip the members of opposition parties of the right to run for
office.

Morsi
also clearly faced at least two distinct strands of opposition. There were those who opposed him on
principle or and those who feared him but before the late fall of 2012 neither
expressed the kind of implacable hatred that characterized Allende’s
opposition.To the contrary, a
significant number of his opponents conceded his electoral legitimacy.Certainly the Christian communities
were uncomfortable with Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood from the beginning as were
trade union leaders who refused as early as 2011 the idea of an MB-oriented
union movement.He was also
opposed by sections of the Armed Forces and probably most of the police.Religious minorities and trade unions,
however, play a much smaller role in Egypt than in Chile and the police and
armed forces had, by early 2012 lost popular support.However, as the economy began to deteriorate through 2012
and into 2013 and as street violence became more pronounced opposition to Morsi
clearly grew.Official Islam in
the guise of the Azhar, which like the Catholic hierarchy in Chile commands
broad respect, became increasingly hostile as did broader sections of the
population, the press, and local communities and groups of soccer fans (whose
networks and institutions have played a significant role in mobilizing
Egyptians over the past year).

In
Egypt, unlike Chile where disagreement with Allende was expressed by an elected
legislature, popular discontent with the Morsi presidency manifested itself in
a petition campaign and massive demonstrations.Egyptian constitutions since 1923 have guaranteed the
people the right to assemble peacefully.Western liberals in the wake of the coup seem to have decided that the
Egyptian people were wrong to demonstrate or at least to demonstrate in such
large numbers while making demands that not only contravened a constitutional
whose ink had barely dried but which invited the Armed Forces to intervene
again in the political process. This is not a question germane to this
discussion but clearly the generals in both countries acted on their own
judgment.It expects too much, I
think, to believe that masses of people will use their rights not only to
express their beliefs but with the kind of unrealistically sophisticated
prudential or moral judgment required by theoreticians of rationality or moral
philosophy.

Comparing
Egypt and Chile in the wake of their respective coups brings us to what
political scientists like to call a “puzzle.”To grasp the nature of this puzzle it is necessary first to
do something few people want to do:accept the not all violence is the same.It can be deployed in different ways for different
ends.Thousands of people were
killed both in Egypt and in Chile after the coups but the nature of the
violence and, at least in the short term, its political implications are
different.This is not to say that
one is acceptable or excusable. It
is simply to recognize that there is a profound difference in how the major
institutions associated with organized violence, the army and police, have
deployed it and the political implications of its use.This is important if any
form of constitutional democracy is to be restored to Egypt.

I
have insisted on what distinguishes Chile from Egypt in order to make a
fundamental point.In Chile the
Armed Forces took power during a period of severe economic and political
upheaval from a weakened president who had never had a clear electoral mandate or
much institutional support.Internal
and external agents re-shaped the Chilean Armed Forces by violence and argument
to make them the instrument for a coup, thereby vitiating Chile’s significant
history of constitutional democracy.

The Egyptian Armed Forces have
taken power twice in the past three years as the country has experienced the
initial phases of economic and political breakdown.They did so most recently from a president with an electoral
mandate and a friendly legislature, but they also did so as an Army that was no
stranger to intervening in the affairs of government.There was no need to re-shape the Army itself in order for
it to remove a fragile constitutional government but the second time around the
Armed Forces have so far chosen, unlike 2011 and unlike in Chile, not to rule
directly.General Abdelfattah
al-Sisi may be the big man in the government but he is not the president and
the decisions of the government are at least formally made by the government
rather than by a junta acting as the government (as was also the case during
the period in which the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ruled Egypt in
2011-12).

If
we look at the way in which the two armies deployed violence there is one
important difference:in Chile
violence was used to overturn established institutions of constitutional
democracy and to uproot the entire set of political parties from the center
Christian Democrats to the extreme left MIR.Acts of violence included mass arrests, summary executions
(“disappearances”), the proscription of parties, the dissolution of parliament
(where Allende’s opponents had a majority), and the prohibition of
demonstrations.Pinochet, in
short, not only repressed Allende and his allies but his enemies as well.

In Egypt Morsi was already under
the control (“protection”) of the Armed Forces when the coup occurred.The coup itself, in the midst of massive
anti-Morsi demonstrations, was (unlike Pinochet’s attack on La Moneda)
peaceful. The military and the
police have used overwhelming and arguably criminal violence to disperse the
large sit-ins supporting Morsi (early July and again in August) and killed more
than a thousand people.Most, but
not all, of the top leadership of the Muslim Brothers organization is under
arrest but the organization itself has not yet been dissolved although the
government is taking steps in that direction.The armed forces dissolved the legislature.They have not so far attacked many of Morsi’s
political allies or his enemies. The Salafi parties have, for example,
continued to function as does the Freedom and Justice party which has chosen
new leadership and continues to call for and lead demonstrations.Without minimizing the terrible violence
used to disperse the demonstrations in Cairo or apologizing for it, it is
nevertheless true that a significant fraction of the Islamist section of the
political spectrum continues to function.This was simply not true of the equivalent parties and leaders in Chile
in 1973.

What
is puzzling is why the violence of the armed forces in these two situations is,
at least initially, so different.Why did the Pinochet regime deploy violence against wide sections of
Chilean society including the centrist political elite when it was clear that a
majority of Chileans and that elite, through their votes and political
affiliations, rejected the Allende presidency?There is every reason to think that a majority of the
legislature and the Supreme Court would have agreed on a decision by the Armed
Forces to hold new elections and that a candidate from the Christian Democrats
or the Conservatives would have won (as they had the two free elections before
1970).Why have the Egyptian
Armed Forces not deployed such violence against wide sections of Egyptian
society and the political elite given that Morsi (unlike Allende) had won a
majority in the presidential election and that his party had a majority in the
legislature?Why have, in
contradistinction to Chile, parties more radical than the MB (the Salafi Nour
party in particular) been allowed to remain in existence and why have some
members of the Freedom and Justice party (the political arm of the MB) been
allowed to remain free, and why have (for the moment at least) human rights groups
been allowed to function?Not long
ago Ziad Bahaa al-Din, the Deputy Prime Minister for the economy, proposed a
truce between the government and the FJP.None of Pinochet’s ministers proposed such a truce with the UP and had
any of them done so they would have been immediately retired if not imprisoned
or perhaps executed. Additionally
why is the new government so intent on re-writing the constitution rather than
simply ruling by decree as the Pinochet government did for seven years?

One
answer might be that the Egyptian Armed Forces are kinder and gentler than the
Chilean Armed Forces. The repeated
use of violence against massed protesters makes this unlikely although it does
not answer the question of why there was no immediate move to attack the
sit-ins. The Egyptian high command may be more interested in creating a
civilian government than was Pinochet because they may prefer a role in which
their power derives as much from balancing between contending parties as from
the use of violence.

Another
possibility is that the Egyptian generals are more cunning than their Latin
American counterparts in the 1970s.Where generals in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile wiped out elected
governments and ruled directly, the Egyptian generals understand the need for
an intermediary.Whether
they are inherently so or simply learned during the experience of direct rule
by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces they have a more complex strategy
which relieves them of the need to deploy the high levels of constant force
deploy in Chile.

It may also be that the Egyptian
Armed Forces simply lack the capacity for the level of repression Chile
experienced. The Egyptian Armed Forces are proportionately smaller than their
Chilean equivalent.Pinochet
commanded about 65,000 men for a population of not quite ten million; Sisi’s
Egypt has nine times the population but only seven times as large an army.Unlike Pinochet, Sisi’s armed forces
are necessarily deployed in a border area (Sinai) as well as in the population
centers.Thus, General Sisi may
not have the necessary force at his disposal to engage in the level of
repression that characterized the Pinochet regime.Or perhaps, as is frequently asserted, the Egyptian armed
forces are simply incompetent as is the state apparatus more generally.It is an army that has not fought a war since 1973 (although
the Chilean Armed Forces had not fought a war since in the 69 years preceding
the coup) and has extensive domestic interests.Fighting more frequent wars does not seem, however, to
be in the interests of the Egyptian people nor is it clear that more frequent
wars would be a key to more democracy.Generally speaking the reverse is true: war has been the pathway through
which dictatorship was consolidated in the French, Russian, and Iranian
revolutions.

Sisi, unlike Pinochet, also faces
significant American opposition to the new government. The US government today views some
Islamist movements as potential partners in the project of democratization
where the US government of 40 years ago viewed communists and socialists alike
as revolutionary enemies.This
shift in US strategy under President Obama, echoed in part by Republican
Senators McCain and Graham during a visit to Egypt in early August, may have an
impact comparable over time to the US preference for military leaders as
modernizers in the 1950s.

There is at least one other, more surprising
possibility:the more unsettled
revolutionary nature of the situation in Egypt.Wiping out the threat of socialism or even social reform in
Chile required more than simply decapitating the one party whose candidate had
become president.It required a
much broader assault on the organized social forces that supported him.In Egypt there was no similar coalition
of parties and organizations whose program was both clear and yet transcended
the presence of a single party at the center of government.Consequently in Egypt the Armed only wishes
to uproot one party but not necessarily to destroy institutions of governance with
which it has itself has long been intimately associated.

Unlike Morsi and his presidential
election, neither Allende nor his coalition was inexperienced in Chilean
electoral politics.He had first
run for the presidency in 1952 and won 5.5 % of the vote; in 1958, running
against Alessandri, he was in second place with 28 % of the vote; in 1964,
against Eduardo Frei he had amassed nearly 39 %.He had been a minister in a Popular Front government in 1938
and an elected senator since the 1940s.He was not only a founder of the Chilean Socialist party, on whose
ticket he ran, but one of the authors of the politics of an electoral (Chilean)
path to socialism.The revolution
in Chile was, unlike Cuba or Nicaragua, electoral politics.In Egypt, by contrast, Morsi’s electoral
victory was the fortuitous result of a revolutionary upheaval in which millions
of people took to the streets.

It was neither the expected result
of a long-term electoral strategy within a constitutional and democratic order
nor was it the result of an armed struggle against the old regime.This verges on the problem of
revolution which also outside the scope of this discussion.Suffice it to say that if by revolution
we mean the entry of masses of people into action in unexpected ways that break
down the old ways of organizing politics then Egypt has been in revolution for
the last three years.If by
revolution we mean the creation of a new order, preferably in some Utopian
mold, then Egypt has certainly not.

The problem is less that the MB
were unprepared to govern as that they seem to have had no very clear idea of
what they wanted to govern for:was it the revolutionary re-structuring of the political order and the
seizure of power or was it the consolidation of democracy?Did they want to dismantle and re-make
the existing institutions of governance or did they simply want to share in the
spoils?To what degree were they interested in punishing and
excluding the old regime and to what degree were they interested in including
its supporters?

Chile’s politics were far more
organized than Egypt’s but they were not accompanied by the kind of massive
spontaneous upwelling of support that has characterized Egypt in the past two
years.Several Allende policies
were extensions Frei government.Allende’s
policies neither extended nor weakened his electoral base significantly, but they
did expand the power and influence of the institutions and organizations in his
electoral coalition, especially the Communists, the Socialists, the MIR, and
the Chilean trade union movement.They also attracted some support in other organizations and mobilized a
few new social groups, especially in the countryside.Paradoxically
in the absence of Allende himself there was every possibility that not only the
left parties but the centrist parties would attempt to pursue the policies of
the UP after this ouster.The use
of violence against even those, such as the legislature and its Christian
Democrat majority, was testimony to the military’s desire for a clean slate.There is no reason to believe the
Egyptian Armed Forces want a clean slate or desire to pursue their own Utopian
fantasy as dictated by Chicago-trained economists.

It is only an apparent paradox that
the Egyptian military has used more violence but in a far more focused fashion
than their Chilean counterparts.Uncertain of their own goals, the Muslim Brothers rode the wave of a
massive uprising.They were
therefore propelled by it to as great a degree as they were able to shape
it.Dispersing the demonstrations
at successive locations in Cairo (the Republican Guards Club, Raba’a
al-Adawiya, and Nahdah Squares) and arresting most (but not all) of the MB
leadership has thus dislocated the adversaries of the Armed Forces’ preferred
order.There is no need, for the
moment, to extend the overt repression to other organizations or
institutions.In fact, there is
every reason to avoid anything that might evoke renewed spontaneous
demonstrations.

There are two other important
differences between Chile and Egypt: the relative independence of the Egyptian
judiciary.While this
independence may depend in part of corruption and nepotism, it is also real in
the sense that the judiciary has guarded as best it could its own institutional
and social field from the other institutions of the state.In comparison to the Chilean
judiciary the Egyptian courts have a history of using their authority against
the legislative and executive branches.The rush to re-write a constitution can be best
explained if the judiciary is itself a partner, through the Supreme Court, in
the re-making of the state.The
courts do not need to be exemplars of justice or paragons of Weberian rationality
to pursue their own institutional ends and thereby limit, even if only to a
degree, the authority of the army and the executive.

The other profound difference is
the emergence of at least one area of opposition to the coup based not only on
geography but religion.Upper
Egypt has emerged as an area in which the control by the central government has
become highly contested and on occasion disappeared.This loss of control is connected to the mobilization
of both anti-Christian and anti-regime sentiments.This too is unlike Chile where the MIR, the Communists and
the Socialists were never able to create zones in which the power of the
government ceased to exist for days or weeks at a time.Even had they created “liberated zones”
in the terminology of the day those would not have been based on any claim of
religious (or ethnic) community.The success of this form of mobilization especially in communities such
as Dalga where several churches and a monastery were looted and destroyed,
Christians killed, and where Christians were reportedly required to pay ransom
as well as the sectarian-tinged murder of members of the Social Democratic
party in Asyut are a dark underside to the claims of supporters of President
Morsi that they only desire the return of constitutional governance.Rightly or wrongly, it is precisely
this kind of unrestrained social violence that many of Morsi’s opponents feared
would occur if his presidency continued.

The remaining question is what
happens next.As in Chile in 1973
there will be those who wish to oppose the armed forces and what Karl Marx
would have called the party of order with violence.Attacks on police stations and the attempt to
assassinate the Interior Minister are examples.In Chile, as in most places, these actions—even if they
accomplish their immediate goals—are almost never successful as forms of
political organization.Throughout
a long history in which they have been variously called exemplary acts, focos,
terrorism, or armed struggle they have almost invariably demobilized mass
movements, given the state an excuse for further violence, and ended in
disaster and tragedy.Egypt may,
of course, be an exception but it is not very likely.

The MB and its political allies
will also face some difficult political choices and it is worth reflecting on the
experience of Chile, different as it was.In the wake of the coup, it took a long time for Pinochet’s opponents to
develop a workable and coherent strategy.In the end it was a decision that recognized that the Allende experience
would never be revived nor would the 1925 constitution and that the only path
forward was the construction of a new Chilean democracy rather than a
revolutionary re-structuring of society.

For Chile’s left-wing socialists,
the MIR and the communists this was a bitter defeat and they have never
recovered anything like the place in Chile’s political life that they held on
September 10, 1973. The communists have essentially disappeared from Chile’s
political life as has the left-wing of the Socialist party once embodied in
leaders such as Clodomiro Almeyda and the Revolution Left Movement (MIR) is
also only a shadow of its former self.It would once have been self-evident that the Marxist left in Chile,
like the Muslim Brotherhood today in Egypt, could not be eliminated from public
life.It was, many would have
said, too deeply implanted in the society and too deeply rooted in the unions
and working class communities.This turned out not to be the case but what is also true is that there
were other avenues for unions, working class communities, and political leaders
to struggle for social justice and the immediate demands connected to it.The MB may turn out not to be the only
way to imagine a link between Islam and politics and their brand of Islamism may
turn out, like Communism, to be a real but historically delimited political
movement.

Michelle Bachelet, a socialist, was
elected president of Chile in 2006 and served until 2010.She was the daughter of Air Force
Brigadier Alberto Bachelet (another military opponent of the coup) who died
after being tortured by the Pinochet regime in 1974.But she was not the first president elected after the fall
of the Pinochet regime.That was
Patricio Aylwin, a Christian Democratic member of the legislature in 1973 who
had voted on the resolution asking the Armed Forces to step in.Aylwin came to regret his stance and
his candidacy was backed by Ricardo Lagos, leader of the Socialists and of the
Democratic Alliance, and himself later president. Lagos emergence as the leader of the Chilean Socialist party
was also testimony to how much the party had changed since the years when
Allende, Almeyda, and Toha had been its leaders.Lagos, an international civil servant with a degree in
political science from Duke University, is known for his work on unemployment
policies rather than his desire to expropriate the means of production.He is most famous for the “Lagos
finger” when he pointed at Pinochet in a television debate and called him a
liar and torturer.But he did not
bring Pinochet to justice and he served in Aylwin’s cabinet.

For Egyptians of all political
persuasions, this may be the most bitter political reality of any comparison of
Pinochet’s Chile with events in their own country today.In the wake of Mubarak’s downfall there
was a long debate about how slowly the wheels of production were turning and
how impatient Egyptians had become.Unfortunately the wheels of justice will not turn any more quickly along
the road to democracy.